Understand Your Niche

Here’s a list of 5 Twitter tools to manage the list of people you are following. As you probably know, initially there’s a limit of two thousand tweeple you can follow; and after you have two thousand followers, you can follow only 10% more than are following you, so for example if you have three thousand followers, you can only follow 3300. Finally, you can only follow one thousand new tweeple each 24 hours. All of this dictates that you should manage your following list carefully, if you want to grow your twitter account as fast as possible. You want to be following the most active tweeple, the ones who will help you reach a large audience, and the ones that are genuinly interested in your topic. And that means that you want to use your precious follow slots for active accounts only. To weed out the inactive accounts and tweeple that are useless to follow for whatever other reason, you need to use the tools we describe below.

Now before we go on, a word about our reasons for wanting to grow the @understandniche twitter account as fast as possible. UnderstandYourNiche.com is a business. We want to get the word out about our superior niche research products, and we want — need! — clients. Twitter is one of the avenues for us to get clients. While we try to make the twitter account worthwile to follow independent of the agenda we have, by for example providing interesting and generally useful information, our goal is to get referrals. We use follows and various other means available through twitter — such as encouraging retweets — to get exposure. Now we realize that this reasoning may very well not apply to you and your situation, and that’s fine. But we just want to be clear about what we’re doing here, and make no apologies for using twitter in the way we are using it.

So here’s the list of tools we use:

• When we had fewer than 1600 followings, we used Twitter Karma regularly to prune our following list of tweeple that do not follow us back. Remember, the goal at that stage is to get more than 2000 followers, so any account that you follow and that is not following you back means a wasted follow slot. Yeah, it sounds harsh, and it is. Twitter Karma does not work very well when you have a larger account, so at around 1600 followings we started using Twitoria, described below.
• Twitoria allows you to page through your list of followings one hundred slots at a time, and will show you accounts you are following that have been inactive for a defined period of time such as a month or two weeks. We used this tool to prune our following list and remove any accounts we were following that had never tweeted or had not tweeted in the last month. That freed up follow slots and enabled us to obtain the necessary 2000 followers to move on to the next stage of growing our twitter account. Be careful though — twitoria sometimes does not get it right, and may say someone has never tweeted while in fact they have hundreds of tweets. Trust but verify.
• Finding tweeple that you should be following is also important. We use Who Follows Whom, a great tool that will reveal the “inner circle” in any niche given two or more twitter accounts. By triangulating using this tool, we were able to find tweeple that are authorities in our niche — internet marketing — and follow them. Even better, the list of tweeple following all of these “inner circle” authorities are our target audience, and this tool reveals which twitter accounts are in this category.
• Once you have a large following list, it is often very difficult to determine whom among your followings is following you back. Because we use following in order to get exposure, after a short while we will unfollow tweeple that do not follow us, so we can use that follow slot for someone else who may be more likely to follow us back. Huitter does this automatically — it is a simple tool that rips through your following list and unfollows accounts that do not follow you back. We use this tool sparingly, at most once a week, as it is an all-or-nothing tool; usually we do not actively promote our twitter account during the weekend, so on Mondays anyone who has not followed us back yet is a candidate for unfollowing.
• For a very detailed overview of our twitter account, we use Tweepular — it shows us how our account is growing, who we are following that isn’t following us, and so forth. It lets us unfollow in bulk, sort by various criteria, and all the information is neatly arranged in paginated format and easily accessible. Good stuff.

Let us know which absolutely essential tool you are using that we may have missed, and please comment on this list! Thanks!